by Debbie Harry
Next up was Blondie’s first real tour. With Iggy Pop and David Bowie.
David had been working with Iggy on his new album The Idiot in Berlin. Iggy was about to begin his North American tour with David in his band as the keyboard player. Really, they could have had anyone in the world open for them, but they chose us, basically a local band who’d had a little attention. Of course we were overjoyed. We flew home to pack and to play two headlining shows at Max’s. After the second set on the second night, we all piled into a rented RV in the early hours and drove to Montreal, where the tour opened. There was one big bed in the back, so all five of us squeezed in there, trying uselessly to get some sleep because the first show was that same night. When we arrived at Le Plateau theater, we fell into our dressing room and crashed out. And then the door opened and David and Iggy walked in to introduce themselves. We all gasped; we were starstruck and dumb as shit, but they were so congenial and friendly.
We played more than twenty shows with them. Every night we watched them from the wings, and we watched them at sound checks. There were so many opportunities to see them and so much to learn. They watched us too. Chris remembers them saying to me, “Use more of the stage, go back and forth.” At first, not being used to such a big stage, I usually stood in one area. Later, I got into the idea of prancing and dancing around. But there was nobody who could use a stage better than Iggy—except maybe David, who was a superstar at that point but still happy to play the role of sideman. Iggy would climb on the speakers and sing and flaunt his amazing, muscular body—and the girls in the audience would take off their underwear and fling it onstage and sit there with their legs open, flashing beaver.
Offstage we would hang around a bit and talk, just day-to-day stuff, but it was a little different for me being the only girl there. I was with Chris, we were a couple, but there still isn’t anything to equate to being the only woman on the road with all guys. One time David and Iggy were looking for some blow. Their connection in New York had suddenly died and they were out. A friend had given me a gram, but I had barely touched it. I didn’t care for coke too much—it made me jittery and wired and it affected my throat. So I went upstairs with my vast quantity of cocaine and they just sucked it right up in one swoop. After they did the blow, David pulled out his cock—as if I were the official cock checker or something. Since I was in an all-male band, maybe they figured I really was the cock-check lady. David’s size was notorious, of course, and he loved to pull it out with both men and women. It was so funny, adorable, and sexy. A moment later, Chris walked into the room, but the show was already over. Nothing to see. Which was kind of a relief. Probably the guys said, “Oh, David and Iggy took Debbie upstairs,” and he got his testosterone in a tizzy. As Chris and I left the room, I had to wonder why Iggy didn’t let me have a closer look at his dick . . .
The set list, a work in progress.
Dennis McGuire
But all the guys were having the time of their life. In Portland, Jimmy kicked in a plate-glass door. He might have been arrested if David hadn’t stepped in and paid for it. And after the Seattle show, the local punks invited us to come over and play at their bunker, this cement-walled bomb shelter of a place. The stage was a mattress. Isolated, in the middle of nowhere, you could play music at full volume and jam all night and there were no neighbors to complain. And that’s what Chris, Clem, and Jimmy did, playing on borrowed equipment, with Iggy on vocals. Chris always said it was one of his favorite places ever on any tour.
The tour ended in Los Angeles, so after saying goodbye we stuck around to play four more nights at the Whisky, this time with Joan Jett. We got back to New York in time to play both nights of the big benefit show for Punk magazine at CBGB’s, along with a lot of our friends, like the Dictators, Richard Hell, and David Johansen. Then it was time to leave again—this time for our first UK tour. The day before we flew to London, my Camaro died. It got stuck in reverse, which was nothing new; the linkage was shot. Sometimes I could get it into a forward gear and sometimes I couldn’t, so I’d drive down the street in reverse, pulling over when the light changed. But this time it was going nowhere, except back home to die. We couldn’t afford to have it towed, but a friend of a friend in New Jersey said he would take care of it. He told us later that he pushed it off a cliff.
We landed at Heathrow in May 1977, just as London was preparing to celebrate the Queen’s Silver Jubilee and the Sex Pistols were preparing to release “God Save the Queen.” Our first gig, a warm-up show headlining over the British band Squeeze at a university in the quiet seaside town of Bournemouth, was an eye-opener. It was full-on UK punk—which was definitely different from American punk, more tribal and much more physical. People were pogoing, slam-dancing, spitting, and going crazy, spurring us on. The skinheads, in particular, liked to do the full-contact body slam. All these boys with no hair on their head, shaking and shoving and dancing. I was almost dragged off the stage. We didn’t like the gobbing so much—“lobbing a loogie,” where the audience would hawk up a wad of phlegm and spit it at you. Ironically, our friend Iggy claims to have pioneered that particular gesture of appreciation. Uh, thanks, Iggy. But the pogo thing was fun, everyone bouncing maniacally up and down, heads bobbing, eyes rolling. That was one of the things I always wanted to do in the Stillettoes, to get people up and dancing. I was so tired of people just sitting there being cool or waiting to be entertained. We loved that the audience was a frenzied, crazed mass of feel-good energy. It made us rock that much harder.
But then the real tour began. We were opening for Television.
Sad to say, it was not as much fun as opening for Iggy and Bowie. There were sound problems and equipment problems, and the atmosphere was—shall we say—a bit uncomfortable at times. We weren’t experienced enough to know what to do about it and we had no one there to ask. Television wasn’t a band we’d played with all that much in New York and our fans didn’t always overlap. The first shows were in Glasgow; the Ramones and Talking Heads were also in town and had played the night before, so it felt like CBGB’s had relocated to Scotland.
Things started to pick up for us when we got to London to play two shows at the Hammersmith Odeon. The audience was with us and the rock press started paying attention to us. After our ten UK shows, one a night with no days off for travel, we played with Television in Amsterdam, Brussels, Copenhagen, and Paris. None of them were places I’d ever been to before, but there was no time to explore. We flew back home with a stack of great reviews and new fans and got straight to work on our second album, Plastic Letters.
Once again, we were in the big room at Plaza Sound in the Radio City Music Hall building and Richard Gottehrer was producing. But there was one big difference: Gary Valentine was no longer in the band. It became clear during the tour that he wanted his own band and we were holding him back—which is understandable, wanting to make a name for yourself. He had talked about quitting after the second album. And then our manager got rid of him. Just like that, very harshly, blunt and loud, as was his way. It was horrible. It was very hard on Clem because he and Gary were close.
But at the same time we were all desperate to continue and carry on, although it was totally, totally uncomfortable. There was a dark mood in the studio. Everyone was a nervous wreck. Chris had to play a lot of the bass as well as guitar and we brought in Frank Infante to help. You can definitely hear some of that anger and attitude on the album.
When we started Plastic Letters we were still on Private Stock. By the time it was done we were on Chrysalis Records. It was our manager’s idea. It was a British label, we had an audience in the UK and Europe, so he began wheeling and dealing. He got Larry Uttal to agree to release us from our contract with Private Stock for a substantial sum and broke it to us in the studio. Apparently all this was news to Richard Gottehrer, who now wanted to be added to the buyout list. As a result of these machinations we ended up a million dollars in debt.
We had a six-month wait before the album fina
lly came out. We went back to play the West Coast again, taking Frankie with us to play bass. Among the shows we played was a punk rock fashion show with Devo at the Hollywood Palladium. Then came another string of shows at the Whisky. John Cassavetes and Sam Shaw were there to shoot the shows for a little film that Terry Ellis, the head of Chrysalis, was funding. It was an odd sort of thing, about Blondie but also about my fantasy of being Marilyn Monroe’s daughter.
Sam had staged and shot that famous photograph of Marilyn in the white dress standing over the subway grating in The Seven Year Itch. Since this film was his idea, he was the director, and he brought along his movie director friend Cassavetes. When the shooting was over we had a big show at the Whisky. It looked like every single person from the record company had come. They all climbed upstairs afterward to the room where John and I were posing for a photo. Every time someone from the record company came in, John would wave them over. “Come in, come in, be in the picture.” He kept on directing all these people into the picture and by the time they shot the picture John was standing at the back and you couldn’t see him at all. It was so comedic, like a setup from a silent move. It was truly a great Cassavetes moment.
I don’t know what happened with that film. It’s probably on the Internet somewhere. Zoe Cassavetes acknowledged that there’s a copy in her father’s archives. But one good thing came from that L.A. trip: our new bass player, Nigel Harrison. Nigel was from England but he lived in L.A. and was playing in Ray Manzarek’s band Nite City. I think it was Sable Starr, Johnny Thunders’s girlfriend, who suggested we audition him. Apparently Nigel came to a couple of our shows with a cassette recorder and recorded the sets, so that when he came in for the audition he would get the job. Well he did get it. Frankie moved from bass to guitar—which was really his instrument—and we had a band again. The hard part was that we were given no time to rehearse and get to know each other. We had to just get on with it. I remember one time talking to our manager about the insane schedule he’d made for us and he’d say, “See? There’s a day off,” and I would keep telling him, “No it’s not, it’s a travel day.” We didn’t have a personal manager; we had an impersonal manager.
During that entire first leg of Blondie, the pressure was constant. This level of stress and pressure would eventually have dire consequences. I always felt it was particularly hard on Chris. He’s a thoughtful, internal, considered person who was thrust into all this rapid decision making and had to shoulder all these competing responsibilities. And he’s a manly man—even though he never comes off as macho—so he was always very protective of me. He shielded me from all the incoming nonsense—which added a whole extra level of stress. He was always saying that he wanted more time off, but we were rarely home.
2003 set list.
We were on the road in San Francisco when we got the call saying that our apartment had gone up in flames. We were burned out in every sense. Exhausted, sleep deprived, and living on adrenaline. Chris and I moved into the old Gramercy Park Hotel downtown for a little while when we got home, which was really fun and nice. The other full-time residents were mostly old ladies who wore furs in midsummer. Our manager now decided that I had to go back out, on my own, on a promotional tour, to chat up all the DJs and program directors across the country. So I headed out with Billy Bass, the famous promotion man from Chrysalis.
In November we were back on the road: UK, Europe, then a major tour of Australia. In Brisbane, I was so violently ill from food poisoning, I couldn’t even stand. We had to cancel the show. The next day we read in the papers that the audience went berserk and tore up the first two rows of seats. We did two shows in Bangkok where there were lepers in the street, begging. The Ambassador Hotel, where we played, had made a giant flower arrangement that spelled out “BLONDIE,” just as it looked on the cover of our first album. Very exotic. We did six shows in Japan, where the fans were lovely and so appreciative. We flew to London to play Dingwalls and ran into some more of the New York crowd, Leee Black Childers, Richard Hell, and Nancy Spungen. The next day it was back to Europe . . . and so on and so on and so on.
Our second album, Plastic Letters, was finally released in February 1978. We went to London to appear on Top of the Pops, the UK’s biggest music TV show, and played our first single, “Denis.” It was a song that I’d always loved. Chris and I had discovered it on one of those K-Tel compilations. It was by a group from Queens named Randy and the Rainbows, who’d had a hit with it in the early sixties. Their version was called “Denise.” I dropped the “e” to turn her into a Frenchman and sang two verses in French. “Denis” soared to number two in the UK charts and really broke us out in Europe. Our second single, “Presence Dear,” a Gary Valentine song, also made the UK top ten. So did our album.
I had made my own dress for the album cover shot: a white pillowcase that I wrapped red gaffer tape around, like a candy cane. Our new record company rejected it; they didn’t think it was “nice” enough or something. It just seemed like every step of the way someone was exercising some kind of creative control over the band and taking it away from us. They wanted me to wear something else, so I chose something that Anya Phillips and I put together. Anya was making some great-looking clothes out of spandex for herself and for the backing singers in James Chance’s band. We collaborated on the design of my dress and I was supposed to assemble it—but I didn’t pay close enough attention to how she did it.
Anya didn’t sew, so she would punch holes in the fabric and cut skinny strips of it into laces. It was very cool looking, but I felt a little insecure, knowing that I would be shaking it hard onstage, a whole lot more than the backing singers, so I stitched it. She was a little dismayed at this, but it still had that look, with all of the laces crisscrossing at the front and back. Our new record company’s ad for the album didn’t put my nipples on display, but it did make this generous offer on my behalf: “Debbie Harry will undo you.”
David Bowie once described the music business as a mental hospital: you’d only be let out to promote something or make another record—then back in you’d go. That sounds about right. In the summer of ’78, four months after our second album came out, we were finally given a break from the tour—to make our third album. Chris and I were still homeless. I think that was when we moved into a bland, corporate New York apartment hotel right behind Penn Station that gave me a horribly rootless, transient feeling.
For Parallel Lines we were in a different studio, the Record Plant, a high-budget place, with a high-budget producer, Mike Chapman. This was the first time we felt that the record company believed in us and thought it was worth spending some money on us. Mike Chapman was the Hit Meister. He’d turned out one glam-rock hit after the other in the seventies for acts like the Sweet and Suzi Quatro. So we were all excited to work with him. Aussie Mike had a real swagger to him. He looked very Hollywood, with his aviator sunglasses and long white cigarette holder, but he had the rock ’n’ roll spirit. He saw what was there and locked it down. The ultimate perfectionist, he was quite the slave driver, but at the same time he was extremely patient with us. He was used to working with untrained musicians and knew how to bring out the best in them. That often meant making us do take after take and because it was all analog, not digital; there were things that had to be done, oh, I don’t know, thousands or millions of times. Or so it felt like. Mike could be a dictator—he would tell you that himself—but he was a doll, very upbeat. And the album sounded great.
Of course, the record company wasn’t satisfied. When Mike played it to them they said they couldn’t hear any hits. Oh, really? What do you say to something like that? What Mike said was, “Here it is, we’re not redoing a thing.” Some of our best-known songs are on that album: “One Way or Another,” which was inspired in part by that New Jersey stalker of mine. “Sunday Girl,” which Chris wrote. “Pretty Baby,” which Chris and I wrote about Brooke Shields. “Picture This” was Chris and Jimmy and me. “Hanging on the Telephone” was a song by the Ner
ves, a band from L.A. that Jeffrey Lee Pierce had sent us a cassette of. We played it in the back of a cab in Tokyo and the driver, who didn’t speak any English, started tapping the steering wheel. Chris and I looked at each other and we thought, Okay, this guy is going with it and he hasn’t got a clue what it’s about, he’s just responding to the song, which we took as a sign that we had to do it. We started our version like a Shangri-Las song with a sound effect, a British telephone ringtone.
As for “Heart of Glass,” that came later in the sessions, after Mike said, “Do you guys have anything else?” It was an old song of ours that we’d recorded as “The Disco Song” on that demo we made in a hot humid basement with Alan Betrock. The demo version had a funky American sound and thanks to the heat and humidity it had been hard to keep anything in tune. The new version was much more electro and European-sounding. Chris started fooling around with his drum machine—a Roland CompuRhythm—and got that tokk-tikka-tikka-tokk thing. He plugged his little black box into the synthesizer and they laid it down as the foundation track. Everything else in the song was built around that. To Chris and me, it sounded like Kraftwerk, which we both loved. It’s disco but at the same time it’s not. Rock critics hated disco; Punk magazine printed a diatribe against disco and the people who liked it. That song pissed off a lot of critics, but as Chris the Dadaist likes to say, it made us punk in the face of punk.
Stephen Sprouse designed the dress I wore in the “Heart of Glass” video. He had this whole series of scan-line paintings, based on the lines on the TV screen, and he started printing out fabric with the scan lines. For my dress, he had two layers of chiffon, so that the lines would lie over each other and they’d vibrate. He also printed up some cotton T-shirt material and I made the T-shirts that the guys are wearing. Steve also shot a fabulous photo for our album sleeve using scan lines but it ended up not being used—much too artistic.